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IBM Launching Web-Based Email Service ‘Verse’

Tech giant IBM has launched a new e-mail application ‘Verse’ for enterprises that integrates social media, file sharing and analytics to help increase productivity.

The service stems from IBM’s $100 million investment in design innovation and adds layers of analytics, social media and security to the application as employees can access emails, calendars, file sharing, instant messaging, social updates and video chats through a single platform.

It is the first messaging system to feature ‘faceted search’, which enables users to pinpoint and retrieve specific information they are seeking across all the various types of content within their email.

Nautiyal said Verse uses built-in analytics to provide an ‘at-a-glance’ view that intelligently surfaces an individual’s most critical actions for the day. Over time, it can provide instant context about a given project as well as the people and teams collaborating on it.

“Although email is considered one of the most significant advances in workforce productivity over the past 30 years, today it has become one of the greatest organizational burdens. IBM Verse gives enterprise customers, small businesses and individuals a scalable, cloud-based social collaboration environment optimised for mobile and Web environments,” he said.

The company is currently launching the beta version, while a freemium version – a model where basic version is free while more elaborate features need to be purchased — will be available from the first quarter of next year.

IBM’s enterprise mail service, known as Notes, is used by companies worldwide, while more than 50,000 use IBM’s social platform for businesses, IBM Connections.

IBM Verse will compete with Microsoft Window’s popular Outlook email service and Google’s Inbox.

In October, Google had launched an e-mail service ‘Inbox’ to help organise e-mails and display information like appointments, flight bookings and package deliveries in a more user-friendly way.

IT industry analysts estimate that 108 billion work e-mails are sent daily, requiring employees to check their inboxes an average of 36 times an hour. Only 14 per cent of those e-mails are of critical importance.

According to research firm IDC, e-mail remains the single most widely used collaboration tool, with worldwide revenue for enterprise e-mail expected to reach $4.7 billion in 2017.

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